Mission

Please Note: The Fat Experience Project is currently on a very slow roll. I’ve recently returned to higher education and have learned a great deal in the last few years about intersectionality in activism that may entirely revise the foundation of The Fat Experience Project (Let’s just shorten that to FXP, shall we?) as it stands now. Look for powerful but infrequent updates for the near future as I revise and re-think it’s direction. What follows is the project scope as it stood in 2008.

The Fat Experience Project is an oral, visual and written history project which seeks to be a humanizing force in body image activism.

By collecting and sharing the many and varied stories of individuals of size, the Fat Experience Project seeks to engage with, educate, empower and enrich the lives of people of size, our allies and the world at large.

The goal of the Fat Experience Project is to map the experience of fat in a way that is human, has a face, a heart, a mind, a body and a voice. The goal is to listen and repeat – the good and the bad, the hard and the joyful and everything in between – in a way that may ultimately bring compassion to folks who don’t understand. More importantly, however, we hope The Fat Experience Project will allow the folks who are hearing/reading their own words echoed back to them across the pages, fall in love with themselves and each other just a little more.

We believe that, at the root of discrimination and judgment, there is often an unfortunate lack of basic understanding.

We believe that conversation — hearing the truth of others, and speaking our own truths — can be a healing force.

We believe that shared experience is key to compassion, and that internalized shame often loses its power when spoken aloud.

We believe that sizeism, racism, classism, ableism, sexism, transphobia and homophobia are related issues whose intersections may best be understood through the exploration of personal impacts.

We believe that the personal is political.

We believe that your lives are precious, your words are precious and your courage is precious.